Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon, the new iOS/Steam title I wrote about last week, isn't exactly a sandbox creativity game in the usual sense, but its web-spinning mechanic has evoked some amazing creativity from its players -- so much so, it's surprised even the lead designer, Randy Smith, who's watched astounded as Spider's beta testers came up with creative solutions to levels he and his team never anticipated -- or even tried to prevent:
As an example, Randy just shared a couple play-through videos from "VAT", one of their best testers. In the video above, Randy explains, VAT "fills the bottom part of the porch with web. I had made it too large for that, because I wanted players to build in the corners and jump between them. But since you can build webs off of other webs (which is a big empowerer of emergent experimentation), VAT figured out a way to do it. Later in the video he makes a web intended to catch himself when he jumps from the top to the bottom to keep his combo going." (A combo ends if the spider leaps off its web onto another surface.) "That was more intentional on my part, but he still did it in a way I hadn't seen before."
"Emergent gameplay" is a term from Looking Glass Studios, creators of the first, classic Thief games, where Randy was a lead designer, and expresses the creativity the player brings to a game, transcending the designer's original intentions. "It's always a badge of honor as a game designer when you realize you've made a game system deep enough for your players to take over and master more than you have," as Randy puts it now.
Here's another example below:
"In this video," says Randy, "VAT wants to catch a scorpionfly close to the main area of the map so he can combo it. He builds a strong web (an especially large one) in an area I designed for that not to be possible, but he figured out a shape that fit in there and met the criteria anyway."
Watch:
"The rest of this video he does some pretty rad things with the moving surfaces that I've never seen before, although I suspected it was possible."
For Randy, this kind of gameplay represents the players making the game their own: "It's like they're saying 'Thanks, we'll take it from here,' and then showing us how it's meant to be done."
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